The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [130]
Stephen Dale's exemplary account of Hindu merchants trading far and wide in Central Asia, Russia and the Middle East is another example, to be put with the Armenians, of how we are beginning to see greatly increased links across the whole globe.18 It would be too grand to start writing of a 'world economy' yet, but certainly there were major new connections. The most important was not European passages around the Cape of Good Hope, but the bringing in of the Americas.
Indeed, it must be seen as a happy coincidence that the Americas were discovered, and bullion obtained, at the same time as the Cape route was opened, for without American bullion Europeans would have lacked the funds with which to trade in Asia. And these bullion-fuelled Europeans in turn affected part of the Indian Ocean littoral: in the early eighteenth century the European demand for textiles from Bengal created an extra 100,000 jobs in the industry. This massive increase in the supply of bullion had some impact on the economies of the Indian Ocean. For example, it meant that ambitious rulers, especially in Mughal India, could now demand their taxation on the produce of the land, the land revenue, in cash rather than kind: hence the Indian countryside was monetised, and markets spread to many remote villages. There were even examples of inter-continental competition impacting deleteriously on Indian Ocean producers. In the seventeenth century indigo and sugar, both major cash crops in India and elsewhere, were undercut by cheaper similar products from the Americas. Later, cloves from Zanzibar were similarly undercut. Some merchant networks now spread even further than before: Portuguese trading in the Indian Ocean area had connections going all the way to the Americas, as did pirates.
Bullion was the prime example of a product flowing around the world. Even before the Americas much European-origin bullion ended up in the Indian Ocean region. However, much larger amounts flowed in once South America came on line. To sketch this trade is important for two reasons. First, it is an example of a major change in trade and the economies of the Indian Ocean area, but not, as Barendse wants us to remember, one that was caused solely by Europeans. Second, it is the prime manifestation of what could be depicted as the beginnings of an integrated world, and this aspect we will turn to in the next chapter.
Contrary to the received opinion, the majority of the flow of precious metals from Europe to the East for most of our period did not take place in European ships via the Cape, but rather in Asian, and some European, ships via the Levant. Other bullion was carried by the Spanish to Manila, and from there taken by Chinese traders to the great sink of China. However, we are only now beginning to take account of the vast production and exports of silver from Japan over the period 1560 to 1668, and even later, to China. Flynn summed up very tersely this whole matter when he wrote that 'Japan and Spain were major competitors in the world's first global market; China was the most important customer, followed by India.'19 Indeed, the role of Europeans has recently, and somewhat extravagantly, been described merely as that of 'intermediaries in the trade between the New World and China.'20 In short, contrary to a European-focused stress on the effects of American silver on Europe, three of the major aspects of world monetary flows in this early modern period have to do with Asia: the drain of much American bullion across the Pacific, or through Europe and so to Asia, often carried in Asian ships, and two major production areas apart from the Americas, that is gold from East Africa and silver from Japan.21
New crops have been